Well, I went ahead and order the ECS Denise and it came in yesterday. I installed it this afternoon and here is what I now have...
I now have the DblNTSC modes available on the B&W RGB out and they work fine on the old CBM 1702 monitor, albeit very hard to read the text!
The ToastScan scan doubler is still putting out the same unusable image when in any of the available NTSC modes. Here is the interesting part... when I move into any of the DblNTSC, the image is clear on the scan doubler, but it is very faint and there is no color.
When I remove the doubler and use the DB23toDB15 converter with any of the DblNTSC modes, the VGA monitor shows the picture clearly and with color.
What I'm guessing is the digital RGB output must be shot since, from what I remember, VGA is analog and it's signal is clear. I looked at the A2000 schematics and looked around the DB23 video out on the motherboard and I saw what looks like several swollen bumps on the HY200 Vidiot "chip". In fact, it looks like a large resistor pack. Are the swollen bumps normal? Or, is it some type of capacitor pack as I've seen bad capacitors that are swollen in the past. Information on the Vidiot is sparse... it looks like it amplifies the output from the Denise for the RGB, but I can't determine whether it's the digital RGB, analog RGB or both!
Looking at the schematic some more, I doubt it's the Vidiot. It takes the 4 bit R, G and B digital signals and the sync signal and passes them on to the DB23 port's analog R, G and B signals and the composite signal for the B&W RGB RCA port. The digital signals do not seem to go through extra post processing like the analogs do. But, there are three ICs directly off the Denise. Those might be suspect!
As for the ECS Denise causing split memory as mentioned in a previous post, I don't see it. I looked and the 1 MB of chip RAM, the 2 MB of expansion RAM and 16 MB of fast RAM are as they always have been!
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Tsargon
